About David Ross

Author BIOGRAPHY

My Story

Did you ever notice that most author biographies are written in the third person? It’s as if they were written by a PR firm (and maybe some of them are).

But I’m a real person. You know, me … David Ross (please don’t call me Dave, I won’t know who you’re talking to).

So, first person it is.

First, the dull stuff, like dates and facts. I was born in Chicago on 29 August 1956. My birth certificate has a photo of the Chicago General Hospital exterior, and I can point to the exact room (third-floor, back right) where I was born.

My dad was a grad student and social worker, and my mum trained as a social worker and teacher. Don’t ask me about Chicago; when I was two we moved to Minneapolis, where my dad finished up his degree in sociology and had his first teaching job at the University of Minnesota.

We lived in an old quonset hut, built for the military in WWII but later converted into student housing.

It was in that glorified tin hut that I fell in love with books.

I suspect that most writers can point to a seminal moment, or, at least, a seminal book, that lit the inner fire and made them realise what they wanted to do more than anything in life; write.

With me, it was a series of children’s books that my mother read to me for a bedtime story when I was six. The stories followed the adventures of a very clever pig named Freddie and his barnyard friends, and how they outwitted a gang of evil rats.

I was hooked. In fact, I was so inspired that I got a miniature notebook, about two inches high, and wrote my first novel.

Now, when I say, ‘inspired’, remember that I was only six. My story was about a clever pig named Charles. The story was about four sentences long, but, hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

From that point on, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I mean, I knew, in my heart of hearts, exactly what I wanted most. That’s a precious thing.

It’s even more precious when you actually act on it, buit I didn’t, not for another sixty years or so.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

On my seventh birthday we moved to Florida, where my dad had a teaching job at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Five years later, we moved again, from Florida to Newfoundland. On my birthday. Again.

At least moving on my birthday was fun. Imagine how I felt the following year when school started on my birthday. Sheesh. What a downer.

Throughout my school years I read avidly. I remember hiding whichever book I couldn’t put down that day inside my textbook, so I could keep reading while sitting at my desk, pretending to study.

When I was a teenager I was introduced to the work of JRR Tolkien, and I’ve never been the same since. I love the worlds that Tolkien created, how he used myths and legend to create worlds that had echoes of our own.

When I graduated from high school I had a talk with my parents about what to do next. I remember toying with the idea of taking a journalism course at our local trade college, but what I really wanted to do was to write novels. That was such a vague goal, and there was no clear way to start making a living, that I took an easier route and opted to go on to university.

I attended Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, to take a degree in History, something I’ve always been fascinated by.

I think I love history for the same reason I love writing; when you boil history down to its essense, it’s full of fascinating stories, endlessly intriguing tales of people, places, conflicts, resolutions, of heroes and villains, triumphs and failures.

Then a whole bunch of LIFE happened. I took an honours degree in History and followed that up with second degree in Physical Education (hey, I love sports, don’t judge me). Those two degrees prepared me for … er … not much of anything. After graduating for the second time I worked in a health spa, a print factory, made tofu in a health food store, and planted trees in northern British Columbia.

But I didn’t write.

One other thing happened. I met the most amazing woman, who by chance was sharing rent with my sister, and after a courtship dance that I suspect gave my friends great amusement, we were married — on the summer solstice, which is kind of cool.

I trained as an automobile mechanic (if you think carefully, you’ll realise that fixing cars has just about nothing to do with writing novels).

We lived for a time in Vancouver, and in the Kootenay region of British Columbia. Oh, yeah, we had two wonderful kids.

Fate, that capricious godess, decided that my partner would find work before I did, and she ended up being the breadwinner while I stayed home and looked after our son. Mr Mom, that’s me.

Picture this: we’re living in a log cabin the backwoods of British Columbia, and I decide that I’m going to start a website about historic places to see in the UK. I’ve always been a Don Quixote type of guy; show me a windmill and I’ll tilt at it, and tell me I can’t do something and I’ll move mountains to prove you wrong. So, in a windowless room in our log cabin, sometimes with my infant son asleep on my lap, I taught myself HTML and launched the UK travel website Britainexpress.com.

Two years of working when everyone else was asleep and a whole lot of luck led to that website becoming a success, so much so that my partner could finally quit her job with the hospital system and take over the home front while I worked full time (or, more accurately, full-time-and-a-half).

The short version of the story is that in 2004 we were able to move to the UK. On our daughter’s fourth birthday. I mean, what is it about my family and moving house on birthdays?

For over twenty years I had the joy/frustration/delight of publishing, programming, designing, writing, photographing, and cleaning the bins for Britain Express.

Over that time we travelled over 190,000 miles as a family, exploring and photographing historic places to visit across England, Scotland, and Wales. I wrote over 10,000 articles on British history and places to visit, and I absolutely loved it. I even got a few awards for my photography, which is sort of awesome.

But still no novels.

You could say that I was too busy running our website, which is true, but I rather suspect that I was also scared of taking the leap and putting all my energy into writing. Maybe I needed something to push me in the right direction.

It came.

Like many small business owners, I pushed myself too hard, and something broke. In my case it was the return of chronic fatigue, a disease that I had beaten thirty years before.

I was still struggling to come to terms with the life-sapping fatigue when COVID hit. You may have heard of it; it was in all the papers.

The onset of COVID had an unexpected outcome for me. The UK government instituted a nationwide lockdown, and also provided a program of support for small businesses like ours. Basically, I was paid enough to live on — just — but I wasn’t allowed to actually work on the business. So, there I was, stuck at home, not allowed to work on our website.

It was, in the modern idiom, a perfect storm, an ideal time for me to let go of the demands of daily life and return to my first love, writing.

And I did. Like really. Wow.

Out of nothing, I came up with an idea for a novel, an idea that would become Finding Bethany Chambers. I wrote it in five weeks. 160,000 words. Bang. It was intended to be a standalone novel, but during the course of writing it I kept getting more ideas, and more interesting characters emerged, and their stories simply had to be told.

So my first novel became the third sequentially in a series of four interlinked novels that would, together, become the Barclay Girls Mysteries. The first of many, many more. You see, I have stories in me. A lot of stories. About sixty years worth, waiting to get out.

This is going to be fun.